I can’t track time well while I sleep. During my nights of insomnia, telling time is one of the games at which I excel. In-between counting stairs and creating sets of words that link in circles, I’ll think, I’ve been lying awake for 45 minutes so it must be 3:15 am, and often I’m within 5 minutes of the correct time, even it if I’ve spent an hour or more failing to succumb to the Sandman.* But when I do sleep, time’s passage eludes my reckoning. On awakening I thought, It’s probably not even 5:00 yet, but it was 7:48. Proof positive I was asleep, and sometimes the only way I know for sure.

What awakened me at 7:48 was an unidentifiable noise that must have been loud if one were nearby, though clearly its source was quite far away. My best guess was an elephant trumpeting through a slide whistle. Perhaps two elephants, because one could hardly both trumpet and manipulate the pull rod, that also being a job for a trunk. Or maybe the owner of the elephant was helping; there must be an owner, as there are no wild elephants in California. One might wish that in the early morning of a national holiday others could keep their elephants quiet until a bit later.

This explanation seemed so apt I had trouble dislodging it, but eventually I reluctantly  concluded the noise must emanate from some sort of construction activity, though I have no idea which. Labor Day is of course a day on which one does not labor, or it used to be, back when so many Americans weren’t forced to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and so many other-class Americans weren’t in such a hurry to have things built, or delivered, or released to the masses, who now yearn for shipping free rather than breathing free.

I guess I’m old enough to have achieved Full Curmudgeon status, but that’s a trap. When I was a kid things really were different, and there’s plenty of Big Data to document the change. I may have grown up in the very best time America will ever have, a time one might call the post-WWII equality era, a time when opportunity really was universal. It wasn’t a perfect time, though. It was the time we stopped eating food and started eating “food,” embracing TV dinners, Hamburger Helper, fast “food,” vegetables in cans, and sugar in everything. Unlike actual food, “food” contains few nutrients.

Oh snap, my thoughts have returned to diet yet again. Time to get up!

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* The traditional Scandinavian folk character, not the creation of Neil Gaiman.